GCS budget: Is this THE year?

The Rhino’s Paul Clark crunches the upcoming GCS budget, which some forecast will be tight:

Close Guilford County Schools observers, including hard-bitten reporters who should have known better, have for four years been telling themselves that, despite the school system’s many fiscal tricks to hide money from the Board of Commissioners and the public, surely next year would be the year in which all the federal stimulus money would run out, the school system’s cash stashes would be empty, and Guilford County Schools would have to make some actual cuts.

Even The Rhino Times, the only news outlet that bothers to crunch the numbers in the school system’s budget every year, predicted last year that the 2011-2012 fiscal year would be the year of reckoning, and that this year, the 2012-2013 fiscal year, the ax would finally fall.

Surely, it seemed, there couldn’t be more money stashed away, or at least Green and the school board would finally accept that, just once, Guilford County Schools would have to take a tiny fraction of the hit the rest of the nation has taken since 2008.

It hasn’t happened yet.

GCS is eeking an increase of $28 million in its total budget and an increase of almost $10 million from county commissioners.

Commerce Dept. money laundering

CJ executive editor Don Carrington breaks the story while the N&O follows up on Department of Commerce Assistant Secretary Henry McCoy’s scheme to direct federal funds to his nonprofit.

Lots of Triad ties here — Commerce Secretary Keith Crisco — who may or may not have signed off on McCoy’s plan — is from Asheboro; the Winston-Salem-based Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation “gave the Sustainability Center a $150,000 grant to cover its first two years”; and Yadkin County would be a recipient of funds for a “Community Capacity Building” program.

Looks like a classic government money laundering scheme. Carrington writes:

Each county then would be required to turn over the remaining $540,000 to NCSC for planning and research activities. NCSC would receive a total of $2.16 million. Records indicate McKoy began discussing the project in November and that he met in person with officials in at least three, if not all, of the counties to discuss it. Carolina Journal was unable to determine how he selected the four counties.

All in the name of ‘sustainability,’ yet another government scam.